Jane

We asked at the farm if we could have a look at the long cairn. Slightly bewildered as to why two apparently ordinary people would want to view an old cairn in THIS weather, the farmer indicated how close we could drive to it. This cheered me. However, it was a fair old walk over uneven ground (no path) in FOUL weather to the very edge of a promentary.

The cairn was long indeed, and tall, too, with some of the rubble poking through. But hellish neglected and in this weather, nothing to write home about. I couldn’t see an entrance to it at all, and the day was too HIDEOUS I lost interest in looking for it and began the long march over the bog back to the car.

It’s location IS splendid though, windswept, remote, overlooking other islands with the waves crashing up onto the beach just metres away.

We turned up at Maeshowe visitor centre at Tormiston Mill at 5.10pm hoping to book a time to visit with as few other people as possible. How lucky we got! The last tour was due to go five minutes later and only had two other – rather disinterested – Chermans on it. We paid our £3 each fee and toddled off down the path towards the mound.

The henge was the first thing that surprised me, being so crisp and well defined. As Julian says in the big papery TMA the whole construction really is like a great grassy sombrero! Our guide, a young archaelogy student, met us at the door and showed us down the long passageway, beautifully square, made of single long slabs of sandstone. It felt very like crawling into an Egyptian tomb but without the multicoloured wall paintings. And then the chamber opens up in front of you! Wow-wheeee!
It was wonderful not to have to share the interior space with too many people. You really wouldn’t want to be in there with a coach party of 20 garlic-breathed Americans.

Apart from the painstakingly neat, tight corbelling, the sheer height of the pyramid roof and interior proportions of the chamber the thing I found most notable was that the tall corner stones seemed to be the same shape, size and have the same ‘angle of slice’ on the top as the stones at Brodgar.

The guide gave a very thorough talk, only snippets of which I caught as immediately I sat down on the dry gravel floor and got out my sketchbook. Photography in the chamber is not allowed, but they couldn’t stop me drawing. From the bits I heard she seemed to dwell at length about the Vikings (’bloody Vikings’) and not enough about construction techniques for my liking. Rather than whinge I just kept scribbling.

Once the Cherman visitors had seen enough to be able to ‘tick it off’ their list, they departed leaving just the three of us. Suddenly it felt very big in there! And very, VERY tall, as I was still sitting cross legged on the floor. The guide seemed happy to have someone to talk about it to that took her away from her usual spiel. Moth discussed the chronology of the tomb with the guide who didn’t know enough about other British sites to be able to accurately place it against West Kennett, for example.

It may cost £3 and you may have to share it, but it IS worth it.

This stone is unmistakeable and incredibly significant as it is in perfect alignment with the entrance passageway to Maeshowe.

Typically Orcadian, being tall and flat, Barnstoneworth United, as I took to calling it, was always topped with a perching curlew or oystercatcher.

As you travel around the Stenness landscape, this stone always seems to be visible.

Sadly, not much to see here, except a bit of a rise in the ground. We attempted an approach, but a herd of very excited cows, with calves and the most enormous bull prevented us even entering the field. This herd meant serious business.

Just off the main Stromness to Kirkwall road offering stunning views across the Loch of Stenness is Deepdale standing stone.

It’s a large single menhir typically Orcadian, being flat and like a playing card about 6 feet tall on a little rise. From up there you can see the entire landscape of the Great Sacred Monuments of Stenness including:
-Brodgar
-Bookan
-Stenness
-Tomb of Unstan
-Maeshowe
-Watchstone
-Barnhouse stone
- many, many tumuli and cairns and even the summit of Wideford Hill could be seen peeping up over the nearby hills.

We sat for ages up here by the stone, gobsmacked at the richness of the neolithic landscape and staggered we could see just about all the ‘Hollywood’ sites. I couldn’t resist painting it all. Unbelieveable position for a stone. Don’t miss it.

This one was my first real l-o-n-g stalled cairn. I had already seen Unstan and Taversoe Tuick which are both essentially round cairns with stalls, but Blackhammer was different. Like the others, it has been topped with concrete to protect it but the construction and its length is what wowed me. (I hadn’t yet seen Midhowe.) I paced it out at 12 1/2 ms!

...it’s quite astonishing!
It is a shame it’s had to be housed in this way, but to preserve its wonders, definitely worth it. A large stone shed with metal and skylighted roof from which a series of walkways take you over the tomb, which is simply HUGE! A great lozenge shaped heap of stones and rubble, carefully corbelled at an angle on the outside walls, thick rubble and then through the middle a passageway 23ms long, yes – 23 of your earth metres! – with at least 12 pairs of stalls, some with little stone beds. Like all the other tombs on Orkney, the quality of the masonry is precise and in places, painstaking. Each stone marking out a stall is about 5 or 6 feet high and neatly fits into the passage walls.

This is easily one of the finest, grandest pieces of neolithic engineering I’ve ever seen. Certainly as impressive as Maeshowe. It feels like a temple.

We wondered ‘why so big?’, ‘why here?’ and not least ‘how on earth...!?’ We mused on it’s
usage and wondered if as time had gone on, the bones of the dead had been moved over the centuries further down the passageway through successive stalls into the tomb, like a journey, until the bones reach the very end head stone, after which, that person becomes a fully-fledged ‘ancestor’.

The ‘why here?’ question was more easily answered as we looked around for a place to picnic out of the wind by the cliffs. The tomb is built right on the shoreline, next to the flat sandstone rocks which form the water’s edge, which chip and flake and can be quarried easily. To build a tomb of that magnitude, it’s easier if access to the thousands of tons of building material is near at hand. And so it is. You can almost see where the stones were cut from.

A large flat block of sandstone 6 or 7 feet tall and 8 inches thick, straight sided and flat topped at a slight angle, this has had a chunk taken out of it, as if some alien rockeater had taken a bite and rejected the rest. It’s a nice stone, but pales into insignificance when surrounded by such wonderful cairn building.

Unlike the other tombs on Rousay, this isn’t in the care of Historic Scotland, so there are no signs, footpaths or easy accesses. This requires determination. To reach it, one must pass through incredibly high, verdant weeds and grasses on uneven ground up a hillside which I found very tough going.

It’s very big and long and tall and I couldn’t see where the entrance was at all. A little of the rubble of the cairn showed through the grass on the top. But I didn’t hang around as the cold beat me. And I now know that I missed out.

Moth continued on poking about, going up to the Knowe of Ramsay further up the hillside from where he spotted the very overgrown entrance to Lairo. He returned to the car 30 mins later lost for superlatives about what he discovered. I’ll let him tell the rest...

The sign at the roadside says 1/2 mile to walk. But the walk is up quite a steep hillside, so take your time if you’re not a confident walker. I found it a bit slippy. It’s a nice walk though, past a load of noisy fulmars nesting on the rocky outcrops on the hillside.

It’s always damned windy in Orkney, but the gale on that hillside was vicious and bitingly cold. I was very glad to find this tomb was also concrete covered and sealed with a big metal door, giving both the tomb and me some protection from the wind. I took the opportunity to make a quick sketch of the chamber without my paints flying away. I paced out the length at 14ms.

Each side has evenly spaced stalls of big flat stones. The head stone at the end of the
passageway was bright green with alien blood lichen again.

My first double-deckered chambered cairn! Topped with a rounded concrete roof with skylight, this tomb is a tardis. You enter via the back into the upper deck, which has ‘stalls’ in the typically Orcadian fashion. There’s hole in the middle with a metal ladder to climb down into lower deck. The lower chamber is as big as the upper with a side chamber, if I remember rightly, and long passageway (the original entrance) facing to the front – and the sea. Because of the slope of the ground, it makes perfect sense that the tomb is split level. What impressed me is the sheer size of the flat stones that make up the floor or the upper deck/ceiling of the lower deck and the perfection of the masonry built round it.

The whole place had the feeling of a ship – tight for space and neat compartments.

I was intrigued by the luminous green powdery lichen growing inside the tomb, which made it look as if alien blood had been spilled. This appears to grow in all of Rousay’s tombs.

Outside, at the front, is a metal hatch which protects another chamber, but is outside the main mound.

Wheeliebin. But this ain’t no trash. It’s a whopper!

In a landscape surrounded by shedloads of fabulous chambered cairns, littered with single standing stones, and the most romantic stone circle I’ve ever seen* it’s easy to overlook or not truly appreciate places like this.

When we parked up next to it, I thought ‘yeah, yeah, just another standing stone’, but get up close and FEEL this one – it gets so much BIGGER the close you get. It must be 14 feet tall and perhaps 6 feet wide at its broadest point.

And it must be highly dangerous because the landowner has caged it in with viscious barbed wire. If you’re up at the top end of Mainland, near the Brough of Birsay, swing by here, its worth a glance at least.

*Brodgar

Enroute back from John O’Groats, Moth suggested we call in here despite the HIDEOUS weather and the fact it was getting late. I was persuaded that it was a good idea largely because it is next to the road, and actually only about 2ks from the main A9.

I was expecting a horseshoe, or a squashed circle in some way, open at one end, but what greeted me was most unexpected.

Imagine two parallel lines of stones with a semicircle connecting them at one end, the other end left open and you have it! ‘Great U’ is a very accurate description of this site.

The rhythm of the stones is surprisingly complete and regular. Oddly, the playing card shaped stones stand narrow side on to the centre rather than broad side. I have never seen this before. Oh and it’s HUGE!

My God, if you could get here in good weather, it would be unbelievable! As it was, we got cold, wet and windchilled within seconds. Moth climbed up to a nearby cairn to try to get a ‘long shot’, but could see nothing the mizzle was so thick.

This place KICKS ASS!